Archive for January, 2007
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This is the first time I’ve used the roof trapeze for warping my loom. This rather long (12 metre) warp is winding on successfully, but I can’t really know until I thread and tie everything up.
For weights I’ve used dumbells in plastic bags which I move on every so often.I’ve also discovered a problem with the way the separators are placed on my sectional warp beam. The centre of the loom is in the middle of one of those 1" sections rather than a section marker being the centre as it is on my countermarche loom. This is a problem when I wind 2 warp chains as I have to split them to fit into the centre section. It’s difficult to explain but so many things like this happen in weaving, and it’s next to impossible to know everything you need when you get a new loom. It’s like the first time of everything – you just do it or buy it or whatever. Then after a while you KNOW what you want or expect and you get fussier.Perhaps because you don’t want to change what you KNOW.
Life is going to be very busy over the next few months for me with work and family commitments but I have a few full weaving days now. I hope to explore my weaving software more, including ArahWeave (run on Red Hat OS). I’m also involved in an Exhibition "Thread Bare" in February 08 and have to prepare an Introductory workshop in Coiled Basketry in a few weeks time.
On the blog hunting, I’m happy that the Armidale Spinners and Weavers Guild has a great blog style site powered by wordpress. This group seem very active and I’m sure lots more luscious fibre photos will appear there.
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| The roof trapeze (at the back of loom) |
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My makeshift weights
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| Weaving set ups are just beautiful |
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I’m thrilled to be doing the current Computer Design workshop at the Online Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers with Leigh Tate. I don’t know what I’m looking to achieve so I’m just going to have fun. I’m using Photoshop, mainly because I have it and want to use it more. [I normally use Fireworks for my photo editing here.] However, Leigh has us also using on-line photo editors such as Cellsea or downloading GIMP.
Teaching computer programs to such a diverse group of creatives can’t be easy as there are many different operating systems and set ups on individual computers combined with everyone having different experiences with computers. But Leigh is doing a wonderful job. I’ve jumped in ahead a bit to ‘have a go’ with photoshop but I await Leigh’s further lessons eagerly. Just the filters in photo editing are capable of creating ideas. However, because I work with loom woven textile design I think I may try to create a profile template to overlay on my editing. I especially like the way I can use it for developing Ikat designs. Photoshop also has lots of tools that change the colours instantly which is better than any weaving software I have – at least for loose design ideas.
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| Photo for Workshop editing |
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Here I used a Charcoal and Chalk
filter directly on the above image, cropped the image, then
cut and pasted strips of the image.
I then enlarged the canvas of the image and added other lines and blocks to emulate woven structures. Finally I copied the whole thing ’2 up’ to
create a new textile.
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The five shibori wraps that I have just woven are now going through the multiple dye processes I have planned for them.The natural 60/2 silk weft is being dyed with Landscape dyes which ONLY affect the silk and not the tencel warp.
As you can see in the photos I’m now pulling up the shibori threads for the next cellulose fibre reactive dye bath. All this dyeing is very exciting and colourful.
With one of the wraps I’ve bypassed the second dyeing altogether and put the shibori tied piece directly in the Landscape dyebath to see how it goes. This means that the shibori will only affect the silk weft threads but leave the warp colours and some of the natural silk intact.
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| Shibori with purple cross dye on silk |
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| Shibori with green cross dye on silk |
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Christmas was full of activity and visits. First our daughters arrived, Michelle and Teresa with Dave her boyfriend then my brother and his wife arrived with Darby and Lewis in tow to delight us at every turn.
So not much time or inclination for weaving temporarily! I start back today with a new warp to put on the loom. Thankfully we have had a cool Christmas, but I doubt whether this will last. The heat just drains the energy out of everything.
The Online Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers will start a computer weaving course soon so hopefully I can be on board for that.
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| Darby as Snow White |
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| Lewis as himself |
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